Friday, June 29, 2012

"The shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers, which started 13,000 years ago, is central to our modern dental problems. As it spread throughout the world our food became softer, so we didn’t need to chew as much.

"This has a direct effect on the development of our jaws, which are now smaller - too small to accommodate all our teeth.

"“Our diets once consisted of everything in raw form - such as seeds, nuts, vegetables, meat and fruit,” explains Professor Jimmy Steele, head of the School of Dental Sciences at Newcastle University. “Now it consists of foods that are often highly processed, pre-packaged, soft and full of sugar.”

"Our food is so soft in relation to what it was that our teeth are actually redundant, says Dr Nigel Carter of the British Dental Health Foundation. “Shocking though it might sound, I’d say that apart from the necessity of teeth for appearance and speech, we probably no longer need them.”

"The arrival of sugar in Britain, at the start of the 19th century, also had a notable effect, adds Dr Carter: “From that point, the state of our teeth plummeted.”..."

There's an idiotic line at the end, however:

"“Some US experts believe orthodontic work, to correct these problems, could be started earlier,” says Professor Steele - as early as four years old.

"Eating tougher meat and coarse grain to build bigger jaws has also been suggested. But that would take centuries to have an effect."

Centuries? The evidence is that it takes only a generation to go from perfect teeth to horrible teeth, as Weston Price (a dentist) discovered. And there's no reason to think that kids raised with proper nutrition won't have perfect teeth. Of course Steele's a professor of "dental science", the very group that's buried the solution for curing tooth decay for 90 years: bad for business, you know.

"What if you have a child with crowded teeth as a preteen or teen? Too late? Should you get him or her to use “cute” braces? Our daughter had crowded teeth a few years ago, as a preteen. It overlapped with the period of my transformation, which meant that she started having a lot more natural foods to eat. There were more of those around, some of which require serious chewing, and less industrialized soft foods. Those natural foods included hard-to-chew beef cuts, served multiple times a week.

"We noticed improvement right away, and in a few years the crowding disappeared. Now she has the kind of smile that could land her a job as a toothpaste model"

That's my kind of solution.

Jimmy Moore just interviewed a dentist who's drawn the correct conclusion about all this: all the nonsense that dentists do is unnecessary if you eat a healthy, low-carb diet. To counter Prof. Steele's credentials, Dr. Hujoel's a "research professor of oral health sciences at the University of Washington School of Dentistry".